Physician Toshio Naito received a phone call March 17 asking if he could take a 7 p.m. flight to Yamagata from Tokyo's Haneda Airport. His final destination was quake-stricken Iwate Prefecture.
Physician Toshio Naito received a phone call March 17 asking if he could take a 7 p.m. flight to Yamagata from Tokyo's Haneda Airport. His final destination was quake-stricken Iwate Prefecture.
It was already 4 p.m. Naito, 41, had offered, through the Japan Primary Care Association, to go and help people affected by the mega-earthquake and tsunami of March 11, but he did not expect the request to come at such short notice.
He was wearing a suit under his white coat at Juntendo University hospital in Tokyo. He quickly bought warm clothes, sneakers and other needed items and caught the flight.
The next day, Naito was at a front-line medical base at the Fujisawa Municipal Hospital in Fujisawa, Iwate Prefecture.
There, he met Yoshihiko Shiraishi, 44, a doctor from a clinic in the Oki islands off Shimane Prefecture, in the Sea of Japan, who had helped set up the base with another graduate of his alma mater, Jichi Medical University.
Shiraishi's goal was "to support on a long-term basis local doctors, who, too, have suffered from the disaster." Local doctors and nurses, having worked tirelessly to provide care to numerous patients and evacuees despite their own sufferings, were exhausted.
Like Naito and Shiraishi, medical care providers are arriving from outside the stricken areas to help share the burden.
Shiraishi left the island two days after the quake hit, carrying large quantities of dietary supplements, 6 liters of water and a windup radio. He cropped his hair short, expecting his mission to be protracted.
Members of Naito's association are doctors who provide a broad range of medical care, not just in their specialties. Jichi Medical University sends graduates to islands and rural areas, where doctors need to be general practitioners.
The two groups are a natural match in working together to support people in devastated areas.
They initially offered 20 cellphones to doctors who had lost theirs in the tsunami. The phones are the type that work best in the area.
They also gathered information from hospitals and shelters on what medicines and other supplies were needed. Then they joined exhausted local doctors to enable them to take a well-earned break.
Doctors and nurses made the rounds of shelters in Iwate Prefecture and the nearby city of Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture.
The largest shelter in the city accommodated 1,800 people. One local doctor, who had been isolated for two nights in a hospital after the tsunami, was treating many of them.
Naito replaced that doctor, whose own health was of concern, on night duty.
Many nurses working there had lost their own homes. Yoriko Anzai, a nurse from Chiba Prefecture, decided to stay after arriving with relief supplies.
At least 20 evacuees, including elderly people, required constant care. One mother was no longer able to produce milk for her baby, due to the shock of her husband's death.
Medical needs change day by day, and Anzai says her aim is to support stricken nurses by trying to meet them.
Lack of transportation adds to difficulty at the Fujisawa hospital base, which had only one vehicle recognized as for "emergency" use. It was the only one for which gasoline was available.
This reporter, at their request, drove in his own vehicle to and from the Kesennuma shelter for two days carrying medical staff and what small supplies were available.
Food was scarce. A convenience store clerk refused to sell me four pieces of bread, saying only up to two were allowed per person. When I explained that they were for shelter doctors, a woman who waited behind me offered to give up her portion.
When Naito and I purchased three boxes of apples in Fujisawa for evacuees, the orchard's owner added two boxes, saying, "These are from me."
In Kamaishi, Iwate Prefecture, a 31-year-old doctor from Okayama, Chiaki Matsui, was making the rounds of three shelters.
A member of the Okayama-based Association of Medical Doctors of Asia (AMDA), an international medical aid group, Matsui took two weeks off work and arrived on March 19.
"The situation is still at the stage in which medical professionals should give a hand," Matsui said.
At Kamaishi Junior High School, where 400 evacuees are staying, a 44-year-old local nurse, herself an evacuee, volunteered to support AMDA's activities.
The shelter is being managed by two city officials. One of them had lost his mother-in-law, but he returned to his own home only once as stress and fatigue were growing among the evacuees.
Mamiko Otsuka, 39, who works at the Kashiwazaki Council of Social Welfare in Niigata Prefecture, arrived in Kamaishi on March 18.
She is part of an advance party preparing to accept volunteers from across the nation, who will provide a helping hand to local workers as well as evacuees.